If Remake is willing to put the work into recreate the FFVII worls as big as it thinks it should be then more power too it. DoC did not bother doing this. It just threw out statements like "1,200 vanished from Junon without a trace". Even if you choose to view DoC and the Remake as part of one whole, that'll be tough for Remake to live up too. Let alone the real world WWII era analogue that you envision. Personally I don't think Remake will go quite that far.
Of course not, but that's impossible. Even the most fully realised worlds like RDR or Metal Gear V aren't full scale. The closest we got was, ironically, FF13, which they did by not showing most of it (and everyone complained about not being able to explore. In any game you care to name, you're going to have to assume there's more than what you see in the world for it to function. In Mass Effect, the Citadel got smaller with every instalment, you just had to take the devs word that more existed.
As for Dirge and scale , Kalm is massively bigger, which could be either swolllen by refugees or just the wanted the town to be bigger. Edge is too big for 500 people, but that also makes sense if it's essentially a mostly abandoned refugee camp. We don't really visit any other towns. And Nibelheim was always a flyspeck.
We don't see what treatment Hollander and Lazard underwent, we don't see then endure and flippantly shrug off Mako showers. But yes, Crisis Core also devalued the process that makes a SOLDIER and thus massively undermined one of the central plot points of the main game. In this regard Before Crisis actually had a much stronger handle on the source material.
We don't see the DGs do that either. The material is pretty consistent that SOLDIER is the best you can do without nasty side effects of some kind. People mutate, lose their minds (the other copies mindlessly chanting "S... Cells", the Ravens (although that becomes inconsistent later on)) degrade, become dependant on Mako -if the suits need to be recharged, that is going to limit DG's range)
I wouldn't call the random machines and monsters that aimlessly roam the countryside part of Shin-Ra military. But in any case, storywise I felt what they brought to bear against Sapphire Weapon was intended to be their strongest showing. I feel Crisis Core agreed because Zack encountered a similiar force at the end of his game and that's what killed him. Not random machines across the gamemap or Genesis.
And the ones in Shinra installations? The CC side missions that explicitly identify them as stolen Shinra tech? The bossfights that are set on you by SHINRA officials, the ones guarding doors? Dangerous machines are quite often integrated into the plot.
In Sapphire Weapon's battle, my impression is that the cutscene is shorthand for a battle. We see fixed guns opening up first, and then a lot of unidentified fire that could be coming from anything, the soldiers with rockets. I don't think we saw everything that happened, any more than we saw the full battle of Lindblum in 9 in that snippet where that guard opened the gate. It's a general impression. As for Zack, he may be a SOLDIER first, but he's still one guy. And they do bring at least three combat helicopters to that one. I don't think we're ever meant to assume all the dangerous robots don't exist.
They only have one airship but they could have a hundred combat helicopters to escort. Since they were making them and not ever using them for anything?
Range limit, maybe? The Highwind is meant to be special, after all. Or maybe they were there and weren't relevant. There's no reason Rufus would go to Rocket town with one guard either.
And you are free to hold those stupid story elements against said stories. That you have seen other games or whathaveyou destroy their setting too doesn't mean Dirge of Cerberus should be free of criticism.
Yeah, but my question is more why this gets criticism here and not in, say, an Uncharted game? Why does this jar so much with fans, but not, say, that Metal Gears wouldn't actually work the way they do in the games? Matthias' infinite army of shipwrecked sailor cultists in
Tomb Raider? If you play video games, you are used to thin excuses to have large numbers of enemies, what about this one causes so much difficulty?
Reeve's Ultimania profile tells us he was involved in the construction of Midgar from the beginning. But as you've said, Deepground back then was only a medical facility for SOLDIER, you know, that outfit that only required a single floor of Shinra HQ. It would have become a city sometime long after that. Which would have required cityplanners, architects, construction workers, railway builders, maintainance workers ect. There was basically a whole department of Urban Development running about that Reeve didn't know about.
Going by
this, DG was well underway by 1987, when Reeve would have been 15. Rosso was already born, and the complex was already being built. And it says in the comments under the article that 'SOLDIER' medical facility was actually meant to be 'soldiers', which I never knew.
But no, the only time they ever did use Deepground it was the two that otherwise needed to be constantly chained up.
No argument here, that was massively stupid from CC.
The rest of them can't stand up to the Restrictors and can be deployed at any time.
Hell, the Restrictors themselves are each far more powerful then Rosso. Just letting one help out with all their problems above ground could have prevented a lot of tragedy (from Shinra's perspective). Certainly would have been preferable to just rely on the Turks for everything even when they believed Cloud was a SOLDIER First Class.
They'd have to explain where they came from, and that control is pretty limited. They can cause soldiers to freeze on command, but don't seem to be able to compel them. My assumption was that the entire project was a screwup from beginning to end, that was too big to easily destroy.
When we start to see more of the everyday to-scale population in Midgar, Kalm, and elsewhere around the world, I think that the size of Deepground will become vastly more believable – especially if they do a little bit of tweaking to it. After all, this is the same Shin-Ra that covered up Nibelheim's destruction, I think that with all their experimentation, given an appropriate timeline, the construction of a secret army hidden amongst casualties and other things becomes vastly more plausible.
Part of it I think is that people take Reeve's line about the three execs that knew 100pc literally, where only those three knew aboveground, when he's only guessing anyway.
Sadly, we do actually have real world precedent of thousands of people being disappeared during a war, somewhat secretly. The general population knew
something was happening, but knew no details and largely didn't want to know. (/generalising)
rather than soldiers (兵士 or 兵隊